The Dodo’s Eulogy: An Examination of the Impressions of Raphus cucullatus

Early Impressions

Upon discovery, the dodo bird was marked as a clumsy, over-sized creature that had little purpose and few redeeming qualities. Although Mauritius proved to be a beneficial outpost to refresh for passing sailors and crewmen, the birds were revered quite little, even less than the quaint turtle dove of the same isle. Writings about the two birds clearly show this difference in opinion.

Under the order of Vice Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck, Heyndrick Dircksz Jolinck was sent into the isle to explore and wrote in his journal that they had “found large birds, with wings as large as a pigeon, so that they could not fly," and "[t]hese particular birds have a stomach so large that it could provide two men with a tasty meal,” (Hume 2006). The official publication from this voyage explained the variety of birds found on the island and denoted the dodo as walckvögel, or a disgusting-bird, and described it as virtually inedible, save the softer breast meat (Strickland and Melville 1848). In fact, the voyagers would use them as target practice due to their tameness (Moree 1998).
A few specimens were reportedly brought to other parts of the world including Surat, India, Dejima, Japan, Lisbon, Portugal, and London, England in the 17th C. All of these places were important nodes along global trade routes at the time. Sir Hamon L'Estrange, an English theologian and historian, witnessed a living dodo in London in 1638 (Hume 2006). This single specimen spread the word about the dodo and showed Europeans firsthand how it looked. Based on these limited specimens and reports by those who had seen them, ideas about the dodo were formulated and became widespread in the Western world. These impressions stuck with the dodo well beyond its extinction like when French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon deemed the fowl as cubical, lazy, only able to produce weight in the place of muscle, and voracious in appearance in his publication from 1770 (Shanahan 2004).
The earliest visual renderings of the species did little to refute the impressions that were conveyed in text. In 1601, soon after discovery, Joris Joostensz Laerle, a European artist, was hired to travel to Mauritius to catalog the local fauna (Hume 2006). His drawings, although rough and lacking in detail, correlated well with what was being presented in writings and firsthand accounts. The renderings above are of specimens in all stages of their observed life, alive, recently captured, and also deceased ones that were observed on the island. Indeed, it was difficult to see a real live specimen of a dodo bird, so it seems that many had to resort to looking at or depicting their carcasses.

The thought that the dodo could not easily be classified in the world is reflected in The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, a 17th C. book providing a comprehensive body of images and texts on what was known of the world's birds. Of course, such a book would convey newly acquired knowledge from European explorations. So it is no surprise that the dodo is pictured in it. Here, it appears with other awkward, ground dwelling birds that were new to European audiences, like the turkey from the Americas and the guinea from Africa, and following the domestic chicken, ostrich, and cassowary on the pages just prior (Willughby and Ray 1678).

These early encounters and representations, deeming the dodo as useless, grotesque, and weak, provided much of the scientific understanding of the species. Little was written on its ecology and how it fit into the island world of Mauritius biologically. The Latinized name, given to the species in the first accounts by Europeans, described it as Gallinaceus Gallus peregrinus. Gallinaceus Gallus means cock or chicken, and peregrinus translates to stranger (University of Utrecht 2012). Soon after, biologist and botanist Carolus Linnaeus declared the dodo's name to be Struthio cucullatus in a 1758 edition of his Systema Naturae. This classifies the species with ostriches under Struthio but differentiates them as possessing hoods, which seems to refer to one of the first accounts of the species in which the bird was said to have "a large head furnished with a kind of hood," (Strickland and Melville 1848). Finally, Linnaeus revised his classification of the species in 1766 to Didus ineptus referring to its location of origin (Mauritius and neighboring islands) and being unfit or out of place in the world. All three of these names reflect the unresolved nature of the knowledge about the dodo at the time; they knew the species was grounded like ostriches and chickens, but they did not know much else. These early "scientific names" forced them into the category as as a "stranger" and deemed them as "unfit" in the known biological system.

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